Defining agile requirements change management

Abstract

As opposed to traditional software development, agile development encourages requirements change. Given the importance of requirements change management, there is an increasing number of studies discussing this process in both traditional and agile software developments. By examining existing works, we observed that there are many ways to improve the management of agile requirements change. Aiming to addressing this research gap, our study focus on defining a process to handle Agile Requirement Change Management (ARCM), as well as identifying practices to support ARCM process. We performed systematic study to map the main practices applied to manage agile requirements change. Our primary goal was to seek a better understanding of possible directions in the ARCM research, and foster discussions for future work. We identified 3 steps to handle the ARCM process, and grouped 11 distinct agile practices to carry out these steps. Even though agile practices might be, to some extent, for managing requirement change, we were able to identify practical challenges when adopting these practices for Agile Requirements Changes management.